Vasudha Narayanan, distinguished professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Religion, introduced Allocco鈥檚 keynote. Allocco focused her lecture on pampaikk膩rar, musicians who play the twin-headed set of drums known as pampai and sing to invoke the deities in diverse Hindu devotional contexts. Drawing on material from her recently completed sabbatical fieldwork project in Tamil-speaking South India, she highlighted the role of pampaikk膩rar as both musicians and ritual specialists who invoke deities through sound. She argued that these practitioners innovatively adapt their performances in response to changing aesthetic preferences, devotional needs and social contexts while both maintaining credibility and inspiring the 鈥済od-feeling鈥� referenced in the title of her presentation. Allocco also reflected on her own research methods, emphasizing how fieldwork relationships as well as lived traditions shape scholarly questions and, by extension, outcomes.

Following her address, Allocco met with graduate students for an hour-long seminar on methodologies for the study of religion, where emerging researchers had the opportunity to ask questions about ethnography and research ethics as well as their own projects. Participants read two of Allocco鈥檚 journal articles, which had been selected by conference organizers as the starting point for this seminar.

On Saturday morning, Allocco delivered welcome remarks to inaugurate the full day of paper sessions. The symposium was sponsored by the University of Florida鈥檚 Department of Religion with support from its Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.

Amy L. Allocco, professor of religious studies and director of the Multifaith Scholars program at 黑料不打烊, has published a new article in the聽International Journal of Hindu Studies聽examining how ritual practices in Tamil-speaking South India engage with alcohol abuse and suicide and serve as a site for a gendered ethic of refusal. The article,聽鈥溌燼ppeared in a recent special issue focused on Hindu narratives and practices in the contemporary world, guest edited by Tracy Pintchman (Loyola University Chicago).

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Tamil Nadu, Allocco analyzes聽Hindu rituals that invite deceased women to return as protective family聽deities called p奴v膩峁璦ikk膩ris. Although these rituals were traditionally reserved for auspicious wives who died 鈥済ood鈥� deaths, in recent years, women who died via suicide have also featured in these rites, particularly in response to their husbands鈥� alcohol abuse. Through close attention to ritual dialogue and performance, the article shows how these ceremonies create space for confronting gendered suffering and social injustice, particularly the effects聽of male alcoholism on women鈥檚 lives.聽Allocco argues that these ritual encounters allow both living and deceased women to voice grievances, demand accountability, and articulate forms of ethical protest. In doing so, the rituals illuminate broader social realities in contemporary India, where suicide rates have risen sharply and debates over alcohol policy remain politically charged.

Allocco opened the session with her paper, 鈥淕enerational Innovation among Tamil Hindu Ritual Drummers.鈥� She discussed how Hindu drummer-priests, known as pampaikk膩rar, adapt their music and rituals in response to changing religious sensibilities, aesthetic tastes and new media environments. Her paper highlighted how younger generations of drummers have begun to use digital technologies and social media platforms to reach new audiences and sustain their art in an increasingly technological world. Through this research, Allocco demonstrated how their creative innovations reflect not only the social and economic aspirations of these ritual artists but also the tides of globalization and neoliberal consumption so prominent in Tamil society today. Allocco drew directly on material from her recently completed sabbatical fieldwork project in Tamil-speaking South India, which was supported by a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship and an American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Senior Fellowship.

This was Allocco鈥檚 first time attending and presenting at the ECSAS, which meets biennially. This year鈥檚 conference brought together 900 scholars from around the world for more than 125 sessions of interdisciplinary exchange on the study of South Asia. It was organized by the renowned South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University, Germany鈥檚 oldest university, founded in 1386, and held at Heidelberg鈥檚 Neue Universit盲t.

鈥淪weetening鈥� refers to the softening of deities鈥� iconographies, the standardization of religious narratives, and the sanitization of ritual practices. Alongside this current exists 鈥渋ntensification,鈥� the insistence on the continuing relevance of rigorous, visceral, and frequently stigmatized practices and beliefs, often in response to new circumstances and challenges.

Individual chapters trace these currents across diverse Hindu geographic, linguistic, ethnic, and social contexts; textual and theological traditions; and ritual and media formats. Allocco鈥檚 own chapter, 鈥淚nsistence, Persistence, and Resistance in Tamil Hindu Rituals to Call the Dead,鈥� theorizes from a 2019 ritual performed for a deceased man named Ganapathy to consider how ancestors make their desires known through possession performances and demand particular offerings and practices鈥攊ncluding alcohol, crematory ash/grave soil, and tongue-piercing鈥攁nd argue that the dead鈥檚 steadfast refusal to be satisfied by anything but fierce practices and materials signals a deliberate resistance to the sweetening trends visible in many contemporary Tamil ritual contexts. Director of 黑料不打烊鈥檚 Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society, Brian Pennington, contributed a chapter on local deities in the Indian Himalayas.

Allocco and Zeiler鈥檚 collaboration evolved over several years. In 2019, Allocco delivered a lecture titled 鈥淩itual Relationships with the Dead in South Indian Hinduism鈥� at the University of Helsinki at Zeiler鈥檚 invitation. During her time in Finland, they began conceiving a joint project focused on the categories of sweetening and intensification in contemporary Hinduism. The next year, the pair applied for and were awarded a Collaborative International Research Grant from the American Academy of Religion to begin a research project that would bring these two currents into sustained conversation.

They then convened a double panel under the title 鈥淚ntensification vs. Sweetening? New Patterns in Contemporary Representation and Practice鈥� at the 49th Annual Conference on South Asia in 2021. The two sessions brought together a diverse complement of scholars from Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and the United States to consider this dialectic from different methodological, regional, and disciplinary perspectives. Allocco and seven other scholars presented papers across the two panels and the ensuing discussion helped to develop the theoretical framework for the planned publication. The resulting book highlights how sweetening and intensification processes intersect with and even drive contemporary (re)negotiations, (re)interpretations, and (re)constructions of Hindu deities, practices, narratives, and symbols.

Allocco and Zeiler were recently invited to participate in the New Books Network podcast on Indian Religions about their new book. The episode, hosted by Raj Balkaran, will be available .

Amy Allocco was elected treasurer and executive committee member of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) during the 23rd IAHR World Congress in Krak贸w, Poland from August 24-30, 2025.

A consortium of learned societies for the study of religion around the world, the IAHR was founded in 1950 and has grown to include more than 50 national, regional, and affiliated associations. Allocco will serve in this leadership role for five years, until the next World Congress in 2030, effectuating IAHR fiscal policy, collecting fees and dues, paying the organization鈥檚 bills and engaging in fundraising efforts. She succeeds Andrea Rota (University of Oslo, Norway) as treasurer of the organization.

During the week-long Congress, Allocco also presented the first report on her research conducted in 2023-2025 in South India. Titled 鈥淢aking a Body for Periyandavar in Rural Tamil Spaces,鈥� the paper described the little-known worship of a Hindu lineage deity (kuladevam) called Periyandavar. To stage these Periyandavar鈥檚 elaborate rituals, patrilineal relatives hire drummer-priests to fashion a massive anthropomorphic image of the deity from the soil of the family鈥檚 native village. Allocco drew on theory on spatial practices, material religion and the body/embodiment to analyze local understandings of the kuladevam鈥檚 temporary earthen body, which is only one among Periyandavar鈥檚 multiple embodiments. Allocco鈥檚 paper explicated indigenous theories of co-substantiality, permeability, and agency and extrapolated from two multi-day ceremonies that she documented in 2024 while conducting field research in Tamil-speaking South India with support from a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship.

Allocco was also invited to moderate a roundtable discussion organized to launch the recently published book titled “Religion and Gender Equality around the Baltic Sea. Ideologies, Policies and Private Lives,” which was edited by Milda Alisauskiene, Egle Aleknaite-Skarubske and Marianne Bjeland Kartzow (Routledge, 2025). The volume aims to rethink the intersections of gender and religion as well as the secular and religious in implementing and challenging gender equality at individual, institutional, and societal levels in the regions around the Baltic Sea. Its chapters utilize approaches from multiple disciplines and present data drawn from fieldwork in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Norway. As moderator, Allocco offered an overview of the co-edited volume and posed a series of questions to the four women scholars who participated, two of whom contributed to the book and two of whom offered comparative perspectives from Poland and Sweden.

At the World Congress, Allocco concluded her five-year term as co-coordinator of the IAHR鈥檚 Women Scholars Network (WSN). The group was formed to facilitate scholarly exchange among women scholars and under Allocco鈥檚 leadership she and her co-coordinator, Milda Alisauskiene (Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania), introduced a successful webinar series.聽 While in Krak贸w, Allocco and Alisauskiene convened the WSN meeting, which drew more than 100 attendees, and hosted a reception for participants. They also arranged for a team of librarians from the University of T眉bingen to present on their partnership with the WSN aimed at increasing the visibility of women scholars’ research in the study of religion and announced the new WSN Co-Coordinators, Jessica Albrecht (Center of Advanced Studies, Erlangen, Germany) and Carolina Greising Diaz (Catholic University of Uruguay).

Finally, during the World Congress, Allocco met with the editor from Blooomsbury Academic who oversees the “Advances in Religious Studies” book series that Allocco is an editor of, along with Steven Sutliffe (The University of Edinburgh) and Bettina Schmidt (University of Wales). In addition to meeting with the editors, Allocco also engaged with potential authors who are interested in submitting proposals to the series.

Approximately 1,300 scholars of religion convened in Krakow for the IAHR World Congress, whose theme was 鈥淥ut of Europe: Studying Religion(s) in Interconnected Worlds.鈥� The conference鈥檚 local hosts were the Jagiellonian University and the Polish Society for the Study of Religions.

While serving as faculty in residence at 黑料不打烊鈥檚 London center, Allocco was eager to connect with colleagues working in cognate fields at universities in the region and accepted invitations through the spring to lecture in Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Austria and the United Kingdom.

An invitation to lecture at SOAS University of London in February provided the first opportunity to share her research. Allocco鈥檚 hourlong talk, titled 鈥淓nlivening the Goddess and Feeding the Dead,鈥� drew an audience of faculty and graduate students associated with the Centre of Yoga Studies, which sponsored the lecture, as well as other scholars who joined virtually. The lecture focused on the spectacular festival of Mayana Kollai (Looting of the Graveyard/Cremation Ground), hosted by a popular Hindu Goddess temple in Chennai, South India. It drew on the ethnographic fieldwork that Allocco conducted on the festival in 2019, 2016 and 2007, and foregrounded the ritual process, myth, decoration and creativity in this unique context. Sabbi Lall, a recent graduate of the graduate program in Traditions of Yoga and Meditation at SOAS, wrote an about the lecture and Allocco鈥檚 feminist anthropological practices. Material from Allocco鈥檚 talk features in a chapter titled 鈥淲onder in the Cremation Ground: The Affective and Transformative Dimensions of an Urban Tamil Hindu Festival鈥� which is forthcoming in an edited volume to be published by State University of New York Press in 2023.

Following an exchange in the question-and-answer period after her SOAS talk, Lubom铆r Ondra膷ka of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic invited Allocco to present at his university. Her April lecture, 鈥淗indu Death Practices and Ancestor Worship in Tamil South India,鈥� was hosted by Charles University鈥檚 Institute聽of聽Asian聽Studies and Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. In it she offered an overview of the diverse Hindu death rituals and customs characteristic of different communities in Tamil鈥恠peaking South India, focusing especially on invitation rituals designed to bring deceased relatives back into the world to take up residence as permanent deities in their family鈥檚 home shrines. This lecture invitation offered Allocco the opportunity to exchange with Ondra膷ka and other South Asia studies faculty about her current book project, “Living with the Dead in Hindu South India.” In addition, she also engaged with graduate students studying Tamil language at the university in a separate mentoring session.

Later in April, Allocco visited Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania at the invitation of Milda Ali拧auskien臈, professor in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Political Science. Since 2020, Allocco and Ali拧auskien臈 have served as co-coordinators of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) Women Scholars Network but had not been able to meet in person due to the pandemic. Allocco was invited to offer the opening plenary address for Vytautas Magnus University鈥檚 Annual National Conference of Young Sociologists and Anthropologists as well as to present a lecture in a Global Politics graduate seminar.

Titled, 鈥淎nthropology, Human Rights, and Politics: Why and How Do We Research and Study?,鈥� Allocco鈥檚 conference plenary took up issues related to the goal of engaged and feminist anthropology, the relationships between citizen and scholar, and the role of public scholarship. Discussion following her talk centered on the concrete ways that contemporary political contexts challenge and shape scholarly commitments, methodologies, and scholarship itself, particularly considering the Russian attack on Ukraine.

During her visit to Vytautas Magnus University, Allocco also presented 鈥淧recarity and Gendered Politics in Urban South India鈥� in a graduate seminar on Global Politics in the Department of Political Science. Students in that seminar read that Allocco recently published in “The Journal of Hindu Studies,” titled 鈥淰ernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives.鈥� The discussion centered on shifting gender roles and expectations in India’s current social and political contexts.

Allocco鈥檚 final invited lecture of the semester was sponsored by the Department of South Asian, Tibetan, and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna in Austria. Her talk, 鈥淒rumming and Dialogue: Summoning the Dead in Hindu South India,鈥� focused on the class of priest-musicians who act as ritual specialists in non-brahminic, vernacular Tamil Hinduism and preside over the ceremonies to persuade dead relatives to dance and speak through their living kin and to return home to reside as permanent household deities that she has been researching. More specifically, her presentation analyzed the range of ritual elements鈥攊ncluding verbal and material ornamentation, communication via flames, and the summoning of the dead from water sources鈥攖hat these drummers oversee. It also highlighted the dialogues with the dead and a range of deities that are the centerpiece of these complex, multi-day ceremonies. Allocco argued for an expanded accounting of modes of Hindu engagement with the divine beyond what is currently described in the scholarly literature on Hindu rituals and Hindu death practices.

As faculty in residence at 黑料不打烊鈥檚 London center this semester, Amy Allocco taught a CORE capstone called 鈥淐urried Cultures: Food and Religion in London.鈥� Taking London as its classroom and focusing on South Asian communities, she invited the students in her interdisciplinary capstone to consider the relationships between food, imperialism, and religion. Together they sought to understand how histories of colonization, migration, multiculturalism and racism have shaped food practices in this context. Students鈥� readings and research were augmented by course visits to Hindu temples and Sikh “gurudwaras,” food walks and market visits, guest lectures, tastings, and collaborative cooking classes to learn about the lived experiences of London鈥檚 South Asian communities and the history of culinary interactions between Britain and the Indian subcontinent. Students undertook research projects with an ethnographic dimension that offered them the opportunity to learn directly from chefs and others in the restaurant industry as well as from members of the city鈥檚 Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Christian and Muslim communities.

Allocco collaborated with Xenia Zeiler of the University of Helsinki to organize the linked panels, 鈥淚ntensification vs. Sweetening? New Patterns in Contemporary Hindu Representation and Practice.鈥� Allocco presented a paper, 鈥淲hen the Dead Will Not Be Denied: Insistence, Persistence, and Resistance in Pu虅va虅t蹋aikka虅ri Pu虅ja虅s,鈥� based on her ethnographic research in Tamil-speaking South India in the first of the two panels, which included eight papers in total.

The two conference sessions brought together a diverse group of nine scholars of South Asian religions and cultures to present on their current research related to two converging and diverging currents which increasingly shape contemporary Hindu practices and beliefs, namely 鈥渟weetening鈥� and 鈥渋ntensification.鈥� Individual papers examined the move to, on the one hand, standardize ritual practices, mellow divine personalities and mainstream theologies alongside efforts to, on the other, insist on the continuing relevance of more rigorous鈥攁nd frequently marginalized鈥攔eligious practices and beliefs.

While we have historically seen and continue to witness movements to soften or mute the fiercer aspects of some Hindu gods鈥�/goddesses鈥� representations, iconography and ritual practices, these panels paid particular attention to contemporary assertions of these representations and practices as intrinsic and an insistence on continuing them. The presenters included an international complement of scholars at different career stages and in several disciplines, including anthropology, South Asian studies and religious studies.

Allocco鈥檚 paper analyzed the dynamics operative in elaborate Hindu invitation ceremonies to call departed relatives back into the world. Grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in non-Brahmin Hindu communities in Tamil Nadu, this paper theorized from a 2019 ceremony performed to bring a dead man named Ganapathy back into his family鈥檚 midst to consider how the dead make their desires known through possession performances and demand particular offerings and practices, including alcohol, crematory ash/grave soil, and tongue-piercing. In the ritual to return Ganapathy to the world as a pu虅va虅t蹋aikka虅ri鈥攁 term which literally means 鈥渁 woman who wears flowers鈥� but may refer to any deceased relative who is worshiped as a family god鈥攚e see a dead patriarch unwilling to settle for fruits, sweets, and vegetarian delicacies, insisting instead on offerings more suited to his appetites and preferences. These exchanges vividly highlight the dynamics of insistence, persistence, and resistance that are operative in such dialogues with the dead, wherein the dead habitually refuse sweeter or more sanitized substitutions. Allocco鈥檚 paper argued, therefore, that the dead鈥檚 steadfast refusal to be satisfied by anything but fierce tongue-piercing practices, ash/soil and alcohol signals a deliberate resistance to the sweetening trends visible in many contemporary Tamil ritual contexts.

Allocco鈥檚 paper was followed by one focused on Tamil-speaking Hindu communities in eastern Sri Lanka, offered by Eva Ambos (University of Tu虉bingen, Germany) and independent researcher Karththiha Suvendranathan (Batticaloa, Sri Lanka). A pair of papers on Hindu ritual and religious dynamics in the Indian Himalayas presented by Brian K. Pennington (黑料不打烊) and Aftab S. Jassal (University of California San Diego) rounded out the first panel. The second panel included papers presented by Dheepa Sundaram (University of Denver), Sravana Borkataky-Varma (Harvard Divinity School), Jeremy Saul (Mahidol University, Thailand) and Xenia Zeiler (University of Helsinki, Finland).

The double panel at this year鈥檚 Annual Conference on South Asia is one outcome of the Collaborative International Research Grant that Allocco and Zeiler were awarded by the American Academy of Religion. The pair is now in conversation about publishing select papers from these linked panels as part of a special, guest-edited issue.

Sponsored by the Department of Ethnology within the Asia-Orient Institute, her lecture drew on her long-standing ethnographic research on ritual relationships with the dead in Hindu South India. Allocco offered an overview of her current research project, which analyzes the abiding relationships that many communities maintain with their deceased kin in Tamil-speaking South India, before focusing her presentation on a class of dead called puvataikkari, who are worshiped as family deities and may be ritually invited back home to reside as a permanent household protector.

Allocco was invited to lecture by Eva Ambos, an ethnographer of South Asian religions whose research is located in Sri Lanka. Ambos鈥� graduate students read one of Allocco鈥檚 recent articles, 鈥淰ernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives,鈥� in advance of her lecture. This article, which was published in The Journal of Hindu Studies earlier this year, relies on more than a decade of fieldwork and interviews with one Hindu family in South India to explore the hermeneutical issues 鈥� what Allocco calls 鈥渋nterpretive ambivalence鈥� 鈥� that arise from narrative multiplicity. Audience members engaged Allocco in an hour of robust discussion and question-and-answer following her presentation.

Ambos is one of eight scholars who will be presenting a paper in a double panel that Allocco is convening for The Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2021. Focused on the theme of 鈥淚ntensification vs. Sweetening? New Patterns in Contemporary Hindu Representation and Practice,鈥� the two panels were to have been delivered at the Conference on South Asia this past October, but the meeting was postponed to 2021 due to COVID-19.

Allocco co-edited the volume with Dr. Jennifer D. Ortegren, assistant professor of religion at Middlebury College. It includes peer-reviewed articles written by scholars working in the field of South Asian religions whose ethnographic research stretches back to the 1970s. This issue grows out of a 2019 symposium that Allocco and Ortegren jointly organized for the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (see related article below), an interdisciplinary South Asian studies conference that attracts 1,100 scholars annually.

By taking the productive tensions between 鈥渉ome鈥� and 鈥渢he field鈥� as its primary interpretive framework, the 11 scholars who contributed to the special issue are able to explore varying strategies for self-fashioning and self-presentation in their fieldwork contexts. They also identify sensory engagements with and emotional entanglements in these contexts and call for richer reflexivity and standpoint work in ethnographic writing. All of the essays in the volume offer reflections on the contingencies and positionalities that shape ethnographic engagements and ways of knowing, thereby demonstrating that all ethnographic knowledge is inescapably partial and incomplete. Many of them argue for privileging accountability and reciprocity in fieldwork interactions and in the production of anthropological knowledge itself.

In addition to co-authoring the introduction to the special issue with Ortegren, Allocco also contributed an article titled 鈥淪hifting Technologies of Reflection: Intergenerational Relationships and the Entanglements of Field and Home.鈥� Her contribution considers the diverse forms of field-writing, including handwritten letters home, creative essays, emails, and more (what she calls 鈥渢echnologies of reflection鈥�), that she has produced over the course of 25 years of study and fieldwork in South India. Allocco leverages this material to reflect on the intergenerational gifts and relationships that have structured her experience of the flows between home and the field and highlights the deeply intersubjective and relational aspects of fieldwork. Reflecting on the sources in her archive 鈥搘hich powerfully illustrate the interpenetrations of home and field, life and death, and self and other 鈥� leads Allocco to reaffirm her commitment to centering the crucial relationships that develop in these contexts in her scholarship, teaching, and mentoring.

The article focuses on a Tamil Hindu woman named Aaru, who embodied the Goddess in possession performances from age thirteen, resisted marriage through her 20s, and committed suicide at 29. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Aaru and her family conducted between 2006 and 2019, it analyzes narratives concerning her untimely death, subsequent deification, and eventual domestication as a聽puvataikkari (a dead relative who is worshiped as a family deity). It highlights the hermeneutical challenges associated with three intersecting spheres: the dominant categories that shape the scholarly understanding of Hinduism; vernacular Hinduism as revealed in Aaru鈥檚 complex story; and the ethnographic research and writing process. Allocco argues that by acknowledging multiple interpretive possibilities, we can enlarge and nuance our understandings of matters as diverse as ritual relationships with the dead, the nature of Tamil family deities, and the gendered tensions of the contemporary moment. Indeed, she argues that Aaru鈥檚 case offers us significant resources for a fuller, more inclusive appreciation of the textures of vernacular Hinduism 鈥� Hinduism as it is experienced, lived, and practiced in particular places and contexts 鈥� and compels us to consider the limitations of prevailing interpretive paradigms and the fragmental and shifting nature of ethnographic knowledge.

Allocco presented an early version of the material that formed the basis for her article at the 2018 Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin. She then presented another iteration of this paper at the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg in Germany in 2019 before revising and expanding it for publication in The Journal of Hindu Studies.